@3 Gluttonous bakery workers? Because they wouldn’t eat an 8% pay cut and loss of their pensions while the CEO tripled his own salary? Er, wonder boy, this is America where people are allowed to, you know, quit their jobs. You can’t force people to work on any terms.

@3 (continued) Hendrickson stoopid: “If people lose their jobs because they committed economic hara-kiri, should they still be entitled to receive taxpayer-funded unemployment?”

Unemployment is “taxpayer-funded” in a strictly technical sense, but in reality workers pay for it. The unemployment tax is not a general tax levied on everyone. It is a payroll tax. It’s nominally paid by employers, but in reality, like all other payroll costs the employer considers it part of the employee’s total compensation. This is also true of the employer contribution to FICA — does anyone really think employers pay those taxes as a gift to employees? The reality is that all payroll taxes are, in effect, deducted by the employer from the employee’s pay. A $50,000-a-year job may pay only $35,000 in cash compensation because of the employer’s expenses for pension and health benefits, FICA taxes, injured workman comp taxes, unemployment taxes, etc. But those payments are still employee compensation. So Mark, no, those benefits aren’t “taxpayer-funded.” The employees paid for their unemployment insurance — in case their employer went bust, as it just did.

“Maybe, just maybe, it will dawn on Americans that the same stubborn and ultimately destructive denial of reality that brought down Hostess and possibly killed the innocent Twinkie is the same willful madness that we see in Washington, where ALF-CIO boss Richard Trumka flatly opposes government spending cuts and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refuses even to consider Social Security reform.”

Yes, this is what it’s really all about: At a time when corporations are making record profits, CEOs are paid hundreds of times their workers’ wages, and Wall Street is minting dozens of new billionaires, we’re being told the country can’t afford to pay living wages to its workers and elderly pensioners now have to consent to social security and medicare givebacks to the rich don’t have to pay taxes and can wallow in even more obscenely-gotten wealth. Fuck no, we the American working class won’t agree to that.

“A Jacksonville police officer has quit after admitting he told colleagues that he would volunteer to assassinate President Barack Obama. Sam Koivisto … retired earlier this month while facing an internal investigation into his comments to other officers after the election. When questioned by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office integrity unit, he said he also didn’t care if a nuclear explosion killed everyone in the Northeastern U.S because they supported Obama. He told the investigators his comments were hyperbole and not actual threats.”

Let me ask you this: What would you say if President Obama gave in to outrageous demands from Iran or North Korea? You’d call him an appeaser, right? Then why should the bakers give in to outrageous demands from the hedge fund owners of Hostess? Don’t you realize if they did to “save” their jobs, management would demand more and more concessions? No, my friend, you are wrong; the bakers were right to draw a line in the sand.

Without trust, without a shared sense of sacrifice, the workers have reached a point where having the job is no better than not having a job where they have to sacrifice but the bosses do not.

I like Rabbit’s take on it. At some point, it is like negotiating with blackmailers, if the workers give in, they will just be asked to give in again, and again, and again.

Conservatives, how would you feel if you were ask to take a 90% percent cut in pay and 90% of your benefits for the good of the company while they got a 900% raise. Would you strike or would you suck it up for the good of the company and just be grateful your lord let you work for them? Never mind, nothing gets inside the “I got mine” blinders of a conservative.

… Chambliss … said this week that [Norquist’s] ideas stand in the way of finding a solution for ballooning debt. “Norquist has no plan to pay this debt down,” said Chambliss …. “I care a lot more about [my country] than I do Grover Norquist.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: History may remember the 2012 election as a referendum on Norquist’s idea of “drowning government in the bathtub” by starving it of revenue. That idea may have run its course like a bad cold. Norquist must realize he lost that ideological battle when guys like Chambliss start flipping him off.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: Wow! No mention of the lies, corruption, and incompetence that were the hallmark of Dubya’s governance. Conservatives still live in their bubble. They’re still fixated on “drowning the beast” of government “in the bathtub” by cutting taxes for the rich and starving the social safety net of funding. In short, conservatives haven’t learned a thing from the ass-kicking voters just dished to them. They’re no better at reading election returns than they are at reading pre-election polls. As Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

The Canadian news keeps talking about how they need China, Malaysia, and Singapore’s cash to develop their natural resources. North America doesn’t have the capital to do the job. That’s not good. Get used to riding your bike, mending your clothes, and growing some of your own food shopping and driving are gonna get pricey.

When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. ~Elizabeth West

@30 Don’t be a jerk. We have to be better than the asshole gay bigots. If we talk like them, we don’t come across as being better than them and that won’t win over hearts and minds. That just comes across as nasty. Save the venom for those who deserve it, not the bystanders.

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